Crime and punishment the British way: Accountability channels following the MPs’ expenses scandal

Valentino Larcinese and Indraneel Sircar

European Journal of Political Economy, 2017, vol. 47, issue C, 75-99

Abstract: Does democracy make politicians accountable? And which role does information play in the accountability process? There are several reasons making the 2009 UK expenses scandal an ideal setting to answer these questions. Our study of the scandal reaches two main conclusions: 1) the removal of corrupt politicians happens mostly at the pre-election stage; 2) information availability is a crucial ingredient in the accountability process. We also show that punishment was directed to individual MPs rather than their parties and that voters displayed a substantial partisan bias, not only at the voting stage but also by perceiving co-partisan MPs to be less involved in the scandal. Ceteris paribus, female MPs attracted more press coverage and, for the same amount of coverage, were more likely to stand down. Finally, we show that press coverage was ideologically balanced, i.e., newspapers with different ideological leaning devoted similar amount of news to each MP.

Keywords: Mass media; Accountability; Corruption; Voting; Partisan bias; Female politicians (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0176268016303330
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Crime and punishment the British way: accountability channels following the MPs’ expenses scandal (2017)
Working Paper: Crime and Punishment the British way: Accountability Channels Following the MPs’ Expenses Scandal (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:47:y:2017:i:c:p:75-99

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2016.12.006

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung

More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().